


Boy, You're Gonna Carry That Weight (a Long Time)

by Fangirlingmanaged



Series: United We. [3]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Hurt Tony, M/M, Nightmares, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Pre-Slash, Science Bros, So yeah, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, earth's best defender, technically Tony is in a coma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-01 19:14:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15780360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fangirlingmanaged/pseuds/Fangirlingmanaged
Summary: Tony's back on Earth, but is that really much better?





	Boy, You're Gonna Carry That Weight (a Long Time)

**Author's Note:**

> This might not be all that good.  
> Sorry about that.

Bruce is conferring with Shuri again. Steve can see them through the crystal door of the infirmary room where Tony is being kept. Natasha puts a hand on Bruce’s shoulder and squeezes, but the scientist shrugs her off. He gets restless, Steve can see the tremors in his hands, as Shuri shows him something on the hologram in her palm. He says something, desperately, and the princess shrugs, helplessly. Bruce throws a glance into the room, Steve sitting on the chair next to Tony’s prone body as he has been for the past week, and Rhodes sleeping on the couch in the corner. 

Natasha meets steve’s eyes, grits her teeth, and walks out. Bruce and Shuri engage again, the princess motioning for him to follow her, and Bruce does after a glance into the room. Steve resumes his vigil when they’re gone, grabs hold of Tony’s fingers now that Rhodes is fast asleep and can’t bite his head off for it, and closes his eyes tightly when Tony starts murmuring in his sleep again.

The first time it happened, they had all been hoping it meant that he was waking up. That extremis or whatever Tony had done to himself for the new armor had run its course and he had been waking up. The blue lady, Nebula, had been up and about in a day. Shuri having figured out the best way to help her using Wakandan tech and Bucky’s cryo chamber, and Nebula having being used to upgrades and having a hell of a high tolerance for pain. Steve doesn’t want to think about the implications of that. 

She had walked in after she had been fit for movement, her black eyes hard as she stared at Tony’s prone body in the bed, before she had walked out. Rocket had found her in one of the training rooms murdering dummies. She had made a point to come back every day after that; one time Steve had woken up to her fingers lightly touching Tony’s on the bed before she had seen him awake and had walked away. 

But tony had been talking in his sleep for the past week, sometimes he shouted but nobody seemed able to wake him up. The best theory they had right now, and Steve’s stomach turns at the thought that something so horrific is the best they got, was that the nanites had shut down Tony’s body in order to repair the damage it had suffered. Sort of a rebooting, Shuri had said, the nanites were putting everything into fixing all of his injuries so they shut down his mind in order to do their job. 

“It appears as though he is not in pain,” Shuri had said, her voice hesitant as her eyes remained locked on the projection from her Komoyo beads. “The nanites are working steadily, but i cannot interrupt or speed up the process unless we want to disrupt the entire system. Not to mention,” she shook her head desperately, “Tony Stark’s countermeasures have countermeasures. Try to stop it and the whole thing collapses.”

“What in the world does that mean?” Steve had asked, looking around the room. He seemed to be the only clueless one. Natasha’s arms were crossed, her fists clenched tightly, while Bruce had sunk down into the sofa as though his strings were cut. Rhodes had grabbed hold of Tony’s hand, rested his forehead against his clenched fist and closed his eyes. His murmuring sounded far too much like praying to be reassuring. 

“It means that unless i want his body to shut down and wipe  _ everything,  _ i cannot touch his firewalls. This is what comes up when i try,” she pressed something on her beads and suddenly Tony’s voice was around them. Steve had closed his eyes and tried not to think of how unnatural it was to hear the man’s voice when he was right there, unmoving and unresponsive. 

“If you’re hearing this, congratulations, you have managed to incapacitate me! Dont’ be too quick to pat yourself on the back, though, as you won’t get farther from this point. This was an easy one, i gotta tell ya, but from here on out the game gets tough. I know what you want, and you won’t be getting it from me. Try to break through any more walls and not only will you fail, but you will wipe out everything in the process. I’ve done this song and dance too many times with assholes like you. Again, try to go forward from this point and you delete everything.”

“And yourself with it, you moron,” Natasha growled. 

“And myself with it,” Tony’s voice said after a pause. Steve closed his eyes as he recognized the flippancy in his voice. He could see Tony’s smirk in the back of his head as he said it. God. 

“So what now?” Rhodes said. He had been standing at the other side of Tony’s bed, one hand gripping on to his brother’s tightly, as Steve stared at Tony’s face. Even in repose, in a coma, there was a deep crease between his eyebrows. It looked anything but peaceful. 

“We wait,” Shuri said. There was something desperate and hopeful in her voice. Steve felt one side of his mouth tick up into a smile that was anything but happy. 

_ You’re gonna love her,  _ he thought as he stared at Tony’s troubled face.  _ When you wake up and you get to meet her… oh, Tony, we’re never gonna drag either one of you away from the labs. But you have to wake up,  _ he’d wished desperately.  _ Please, Tony, you have to wake up.  _

  
  
  


Three weeks. That’s how long it took for Tony to give any semblance that he was coming back. It took three weeks of Bruce and Shuri throwing scientific jargon at his immobile form, three weeks of Natasha singing to him softly in russian in the early hours of the morning, three weeks of Rhodey regaling them with stories from them with stories of their days at MIT and after… three whole weeks of Steve keeping watch over him as he slept. Once, two weeks ago at around three am, Steve thinks he might have twitched a finger. But that had been before Rhodes and Romanoff had forced him off his ass and to a shower and some food, he’d barely winked his eyes shut for the week before that, so he might have imagined it. Maybe. Secretly he thinks Tony  _ had _ heard him pleading to wake up and tried to. 

In the end, it’s none of the previous things he mentioned that does the trick. He’s just rambling, at this point, it’s been seventy two hours since he last actually slept and it’s a bad day and the steady beep of Tony’s heart monitor is doing nothing to calm his nerves. He has his sketchbook open in his lap, he’s working on a drawing of one of the last times he’d seen Tony, in Germany, kneeling over a boy in a onesie. 

“I still don’t know his name,” Steve says to the drawing. He shades in the black around Spider-Man’s eyes, shifting in his seat, as he carefully colors in the brightness of Tony’s armor glinting in the sun. “I wanted to turn, you know. I wanted to make sure he was okay, and you don't know how much i wish you knew that… It… I hate that you think i would truly want to hurt him. Any of you. I know i did a crap job of… of… negating that, i guess. But I still wish,” he colors in the armor a little more aggressively. He doesn’t know to explain that he felt truly sorry for ever hurting Tony the way he did. More than that, it still haunts him to know Tony truly thought he’d--that he would ever--steve had seen it that day, straddling down the armor, the way Tony had moved his hands on a last ditch effort to protect himself. And  _ Steve _ had been the reason why. 

“Mmmm…”

Steve’s head snapped up to look at the man on the hospital bed; for a second he was sure he was hallucination. He was half convinced on finally heeding Natasha’s advice and taking a nap. Rhodes was currently on his sleeping shift, but as Steve had already skipped three of his he was starting to consider calling him. Then,  _ then,  _ Tony’s fingers twitched between his own. 

“Pete-- _ Peter _ ,” Tony whimpered. The fingers in Steve’s hold spasmed, and Tony’s head twitched to the side. “ _ I’m sorry _ .”

“Tony,” Steve said softly, hald rising from his seat. That’d be as far as he got. 

“ _ PETER! Stop, please, please, leave him alone!”  _ Tony’s head tossed to the other side. His fingers grabbing at the sheets underneath him, and Steve had enough experience with night terrors to know what this was. He hit the button on the wall at once, Tony’s heart monitors a jarring jumble of noise in the background. “ _ NOT HIM!” _

“Tony, wake up!” Steve clutched the fingers held in his a little tighter, taking care not to hurt him. “It’s just a dream! Tony! It’s just a dream!”

But Tony wasn’t listening, and just as he was about to get up to hold him by the shoulders, Bruce and Shuri burst in through the doors. Shuri immediately going to her machines, beads at the ready, and Bruce taking care of holding Tony down. They began talking in medical jargon Steve had no hope to follow, and was pushed aside. Away from Tony. his mind snapped to attention five paces away from the bed, and just as he was about to reclaim his position, to at least try to offer his friend some comfort, Natasha was standing in front of him, hand on his chest. He glared down at her. 

“Let them check him over,” she said quietly as she pushed him farther away and out of the room. The glass doors immediately closed behind them. He could still see, over her head, as Bruce’s mouth moved while he talked to Tony. Tony, who was still clearly in distress, eyes scrunched tight and tears running down his temples.  _ He’s trapped _ , a voice in the back of Steve’s head said,  _ he’s trapped in his own head.  _

“Tasha?” he asks, eyes still stuck on Tony’s tossing form. His voice sounds unfamiliar to his own ears, small and brittle, and he can feel her gaze on him. “Who’s Peter?”

She makes a noise, almost inaudible, but it’s enough for him. It’s like the breath got punched out of her, just then, and her hand sneaks into his. She doesn't have to say anything, but he understands. Whoever this Peter is, it’s enough to have the strongest man he has ever met trapped in a hell of his own making. 


End file.
